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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#321

Post by nerdponx »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #299
Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

> I do need at least one baker capable of drawing a valid orbital configuration. this way of thinking that contributes to such a toxic job market. there's too many people applying for too few jobs. that's it. this bullcrap about inflation, baking bread, interest rates, team building are all symptoms of entitlement. if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way.

Asking people irrelevant questions and rejecting them on irrelevant grounds is a lot sillier than just rejecting people because you have too many applications.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#322

Post by gosub100 »

bmitc wrote: post #249
evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. This is really key. I have applied for jobs before, and then get questions like: "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?". Only that, none of that shows up in my profile or resume. But they act surprised and completely shrug off how a decade of software and other relev…

Does that company hire or recruiter hire h1b? In order to get h1b approval, you have to make the case that "we interviewed x,000 people andwe just can't find any qualified applicants! ". I'm starting to suspect that the industry has learned to set salaries low and churn enough applicants in order to reduce costs. One way to churn them is to do a phone screen and find a quick way to legally get rid of them. Then once you get the type of applicant you want - that happens to work for 20% less and never complains because his foreign residency is tied to his employer - simply don't ask them the question.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#323

Post by pants2 »

funemployd wrote: post #310
Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

4-5 hours... per job. Do you think most people apply to a single job and just get it?

That's the whole process if you get hired. In the hiring process at my company we'll maybe give take-home assignments to three candidates for one role. So by the time you're doing our 4-hour assignment, you have about a 1/3 chance of getting the job. Not a bad deal in my opinion.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#324

Post by funemployd »

zeroCalories wrote: post #129
caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

Yeah I feel like this is sour grapes from midwits that aren't as good at programming as they think they are. Sometimes you get a dick interviewer that asks you a trick question, but most interviewers don't care if you get a problem exactly right, they just want to hear you discuss a problem intelligently and show expertise while coding.

Let me guess: you're one of the good ones.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#325

Post by fundad »

candiddevmike wrote: post #121
csomar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one understands or is willing to research these things anymore. Everyone (or at least everyone who is screaming and being heard) is mumbling points about interest, boom/bust, AI, etc... The reality, in my opinion, the governments have made it so hard to start and maintain a business that the market is not liquid for employment anymore. It's not catastrophic, but rather dead (as not moving). Here are the employment…

What did the government do here? Interest rates?

In 2017, the government passed a law that raised a tax in 2022. According to some, supporters of the tax raise could claim the raise wasn't real because it could be reversed before 2022.

From https://stratechery.com/2023/buzzfeed-shutters-news-startups...

> Because the 2017 “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was passed via the reconciliation process (in order to avoid a filibuster), it had to be budget neutral after 10 years; one tactic used to accomplish this is to make future changes to the tax code that increase revenue, even though the bill’s drafters anticipate those changes will be rolled back before they are implemented.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#326

Post by markus_zhang »

ajkjk wrote: post #190
caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

I think the best coding interview is to test some fundamental CS knowledge.

For example: given a scanner, write a simple calculator that deals with precedence and only needs to support +-*/

It shouldn't take a huge amount of time to get a parser done, with BNF or not.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#327

Post by cortesoft »

ajkjk wrote: post #190
caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

There is also a third group, who can't do well at either task.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#328

Post by pants2 »

golergka wrote: post #309
Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

I love long takehomes. They're like pet projects, but with clearly defined goals and with people that might even give you a review if you're lucky. I always use them to try a new library or a framework, and often continue improving on them even after they're submitted and evaluated.

I had a take-home assignment to build a Dropbox competitor around 10 years ago, it was a pretty big project but I actually still use it for sharing files with friends because it's legitimately much easier to use than Dropbox.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#329

Post by BerislavLopac »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops

From the perspective of someone with 30 years of professional SWE experience, my biggest gripe is when interviewers are simply incompetent to evaluate a person for the role they interview for. Quite often they don't have the relevant experience (so you have data scientists interviewing candidates for a backend engineer role), or they are way more junior than the role (simply because the team is lacking someone with the relevant experience).

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